Crew skill for sage?

[Dubblebass]

I didn't say they weren't enjoyable. I like all the crew skills as they are indeed fun. But that doesn't mean they're all useful at endgame. If you don't care about that fine, point taken.

 

But I'm talking to those who do care about how useful their profession is to them and their guild at endgame. It's not about money, which there's already plenty of thanks to dailies. It's about the benefits the crew skill brings to the table. Just because your wife has Biochem, doesn't mean it would be useless to you. There's quite a lot she can't share with you in the form of reusable medpacks, stims that persist through death, and unique adrenals that can easily change the course of any fight against someone who doesn't have them. And those are benefits that far outweigh any other crew skill currently.

 

You're right the makeup of the professions could change, but it's beyond could. For anyone serious about endgame content, it's quickly becoming MUST change or else. With "or else" being everyone rerolling their crew skills to Biochem. If BW doesn't add more utility to each profession you'll see them getting delegated mostly to alts as Biochem is one of the ones (and the strongest of those ones) that will continue to influnence your character's performance at endgame.

 

If people want a breakdown of how the current professions are performing with their unique benefits in endgame I can easily cover most of them:

Artifice: Color Crystals and Mods that can be crafted are on par with Ilum/Belsavis daily rewards, and immediately inferior to the mods in Champion PvP gear which is easily acquired. Higher Mod recipes exist, but are rare single drop schematics in operations from what I've heard and only on par with the ilvl 56 mods in Champion gear. Mastercraft offhands should last you until and Ops drop with a good augment as they're better than Champion gear for PvE. Many of the Schems and mats for rare color crystals do not exist in game yet.

Synthweaving: Can produce BIS bracers and belts faster than you could normally acquire them after 50 by gearing up to do raiding. However this requires an epic lvl 49 augment to be true (exceedingly rare and expensive). Most of it's other mastercrafts are actually inferior to champion PvP gear for PvE content.

Cybertech: Same as Artifice in the mods department, your epic RE mods are only on par with the worst tier of readily available epic mods from daily rewards. Higher schematics can be gained in the same fashion as Artifice. Both it's custom mounts and unique grenades remain usable after dropping the profession, leading many to power lvl it to 400, craft what they want, and drop it for something else. In terms of combat influence, only it's grenades offer a benefit, as they're great in PvP, but they all share a 5 minute cooldown. Epic Ship parts aren't necessary for any of the current Space Content, and Droid parts are relegated to companions, which are being removed from Ilum PvP combat in the future, and thus only useful at endgame for soloing.

Armtech: Probably the profession I know least about with good reason. Very few people seem to have it since it's lackluster in terms of ability. Can only craft Weapons and their associated mods for tech users. I have no idea how it's mastercrafts fair for endgame.

Armormech: Embarked on the same boat as Synthweaving, at the same time. Different only in that it's the tech user version of synth, which makes it more useful for your companions, who again have no function outside of solo play at endgame.

BioChem: To rehash, it can make reusable medpacks (which aren't as good as the consumable blue medpacks) and reusable stims that persist through death (which are as good as the consumable version), both of which save you money and resources once made. Can craft better implants than champion's gear offers for PvE, meaning it's already on par with Synthweaving since you have 2 implant slots. It's unique adrenals share a 3 minute cooldown and boost your rating in a particular stat by 500+ for a 15 second duration. Essentially making it 2-3 times as potent as regular relic cooldowns in many cases. Aside from Cybertech grenades this is the only unique perk that will persist in usefulness once in a full BiS set of gear for your endgame playstyle.

Slicing: Not a crafting skill so much as a mission/gatherer hybrid. Only included it because of it's uniqueness as a profession. Even after the nerf it still turns a decent profit if you take the time to research what missions to run and which to avoid. Provides you easier access to augments meaning you won't have to buy them.

 

As you can see it's not necessarily that BioChem is so OP, it's just every other profession sucks so much for usefulness by comparison. So much so that you could take the next two most useful professions (Synthweaving/Armormech and Cybertech) and combine them, and they still wouldn't be as useful as Biochem.

 

Awesome info! You taught me two things about biochem I was unaware of: that you can craft persistent through death stims and you craft implants. We were just talking in guild last night wondering who crafted implants. Good to know info.

[Arkene]

from the companions crew bonuses we should probably be doing Synthweaving, Nadia gives a bonus to that.

[Deedre]

Nadia also has a diplomacy crit bonus; synthweaving can bite me, that's 100% a credit sink so far as I can tell.

 

Truthfully, our companions aren't very good for biochem, only Nadia and Qyzen bring goodies to the table. But even if I had zero companion bonuses...I'd still be running with biochem. I might eventually drop one or the other of dip or bioanalysis and put those on alts, but until and unless professions get a do over in this game, it's biochem or nothing for mains.